Baby Name Books? Really.

Plot springs from character…I’ve always sort of believed that these people inside of me—these characters—know who they are and what they’re about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don’t type. —Anne Lamott

“Are you trying to tell me something?” His expression is just a little panicky.

I just wanted to put my feet up after a day of baking Christmas pies and bury myself in the Baby Name Book and mindless TV. “No, why?”

“Well, uh, Baby Name Books scattered around are a little concerning.”

I sink into the love seat and twist around to look at him. “What you’re thinking is impossible, you know.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Double impossible.”

“Yeah, but…”

I look at the stack of books next to me, the scratch paper, clipboard, and pen. “You’ve never really been around when I’ve been building a character, have you?”

“I heard you talk about it, I think.” I always figured he wasn’t really listening, just sort of politely letting me yammer on and on. You know, husband and wife speak. I was impressed, he’d heard that much. “Build? And Baby Name Books figure into it?”

“Yes, for me, that’s first, along with the phone book.”

“You call them up?”

“No.” I smile. Wouldn’t that be great? Call the character and ask him/her about them self.

“Then what’s the phone book for?”

“Last names.”

His frown deepens. “Huh. Then what.”

“My cattle call binder and the horoscope book.” I point to the two five-inch wide binders and my dog-eared Linda Goodman’s Love Signs horoscope book.

“Do I want to know what you use them for? Cattle call binder?”

“I do try outs.”

“Try outs.” I get a blank stare.

“I go through pictures…of actors, magazine ads, what have you, until I find my character.”

“But now, it’s baby names. How do you decide on a name?”

A good question, but I don’t know how to answer, but I try. “There’s this shadow person, somewhere in my mind. Maybe, better called, a seed person. Once I learn their name, the details start coming to me. Until then, they kind of stay in the shadows.”

“I thought you were rewriting your Heart’s series.”

“I am.”

“Then aren’t the characters already…built?”

And he’s hit the nail on the head. When I started the series—I don’t even like to say how long ago…let’s put it this way, 3 computers ago…with all the information on floppies. My new computer doesn’t have one and thank goodness, for my computer guru—I started with the youngest brother and that is how it must progress, but I knew little about the others and it showed when they appear in the book.

Anyway, I’ve rereading everything—all of the first three books, found the gift of an editor’s notes all through the first three chapters of the first book when something happened. And then the dreams-day and night returned. Finally.

These last three years have been absent of the dreams or muse or whatever you want to say. I’ve worked along, writing or rewriting off the cuff, so to speak, figuring that was going to be the way I had to work from now on. It wasn’t as easy or as fun, and maybe, it would have been a blessing if I could have just stopped writing. I couldn’t. It just wasn’t going to be like before. It also left me a little disoriented. It just no longer felt completely like my way of writing, like there was this other layer or something. I didn’t dwell on it any more than I had to, but it did sadden me. I’ve always lived with that feeling of living two lives’s —mine, and the story life in my head. Hard, but familiar. I’ve been doing it all my life. Like a little twist to one of my favorite t-shirt quotes: I live in my own little two worlds but that’s ok, I know me there.

Recently there’s been a return of those day and night dream interruptions but gentle, vague proddings, not the vivid, attention-demanding interruptions I’m used to. Until I reread the series. As I said, as I wrote this series I worked away on the books, each one after the other, knowing where I was going, knowing the characters when I got to their book, but that fourth book—I couldn’t see any part of it. Could barely see Gallagher, the fourth brother, the brother everyone else looked up to. I tried. I did, but it just didn’t seem to happen.

Someone, I can’t remember who, told me not to worry, the story would get here when I was ready. But I was just blank about Gallaher’s story and worse, Gallagher. It was one of the reasons I stopped submitting the series. I think of it as abandoning it. I just kind of left it in mid-stride. Or it felt like that anyway. There was the rest of the story and I just didn’t know where or what it was. I felt certain it was there. I just didn’t trust it would arrive when I needed it. I find that a lot. The not trusting myself.

Last week, as I started the rewrite for the first book in the Heart’s Series, I bumped right into Gallagher and his romance. More than that, I realized what was wrong with the whole series. What was a missing piece, what was always missing? The series would never work, if I didn’t know, at least some of Gallagher’s story. Know his character, know the character of the woman he falls in love with. I couldn’t do a quality rewrite until I had at least a vague outline of his story and a great character sketch of him and his heroine.

Though the books needed to stand alone, they need to mesh, too. How else do you show a family of four boys and their love stories? I needed a name to go forward. And a woman. I needed a better character sketch for Gallagher. And just when I realized I needed it, it arrived.

Sometimes a name comes to you, but other times its gut knowledge, a recognition of a person. We know them, the characters in our books, like old acquaintances.

During this short week between holiday family get-togethers, I’ll be getting to know Gallagher and his lady. Finally.